Category Archives: Simplicity

The 10 Best Simplicity Books

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When does a movement or decision strike with such force that it becomes instrumental in one’s life?

Is it a moment experienced personally, or one that another teaches?

I’ve never been good at Damascene moments. Even clear indicators often have me going the wrong way (with the clarity of retrospect).

I don’t know when I first started to simplify. What I do know is that a few key books have helped me along the way. Here are my favourites, in no particular order. Sorry for the lazy-looking list approach, but these actually take some time behind the scenes and I’ve tried to qualify my choices. Enjoy.

1. Siddharta by Herman Hesse. I remember reading this in a little shack by the crystal clear waters of Lake Malawi. It was a friend’s copy and one of her friends had written ‘I love you’ deep within the pages at a random point. There couldn’t be a more fitting book in which to write such a message. Although it is short, all of life’s mysteries lie within. I must have noted down most of the book in my diary. Although simplicity is not its central message, per se, it is very much at the core of this wonderful, wonderful book.

2. Small is Beautiful by E. F. Schumacher. It’s tagline is ‘A study of Economics as if People Mattered’ which neatly encapsulates the book and my views of traditional economics. Schumacher was a brilliant mind and managed to write a paper that caught the imagination of Keynes whilst working in the fields as a war runaway. It is another small book, elegant and evidence of a sensational mind.

3. Voluntary Simplicity by Duane Elgin. Perhaps the most famous simplicity tome, just re-released. It cleverly uses other peoples’ stories cumulating in a popular yet wide-ranging guide to simplification. As much included because of it’s influence as the wonderful message it preaches. Here’s an article I wrote about it.

4. Happiness by Matthieu Ricard. Matthieu is a French-born Buddhist monk, famous for the book he wrote with his father called the Monk and the Philosopher. Although Buddhist, the book is a recipe for happiness and one of the key ingredients that Matthieu mentions often is simplicity. He’s also an exceptional photographer – have a look at his website to see some of his photos.

5. Walden by Henry David Thoreau. I’ve mentioned Thoreau and Walden in this previous post, so I won’t say too much more. This book is somewhat indigestible at times, but sits as one of the most influential and important simplicity books of all time.

6. Ancient Futures by Helena Norberg-Hodge. Again, I’ve posted about this before. What struck a chord with me in this book was its majestic coverage of a culture that lived so simply, so purely and with such elegance.

7. To Have or to Be by Eric Fromm. This is quite a dense philosophical book which discusses our ‘western’ obsession with consumption, versus the idea that what we are, is more important than what we have. It is a classic, even if it’s not always easy.

8. Maverick by Ricardo Semler. I love this book. It details one man’s desire to break the typical business mode and do things differently with great effect. If I ever run a sizable business again I shall look to Maverick to set my rules. Some might not understand how this fits in with simplicity – but at its core Ricardo is talking about letting a business run itself and adhering to natural forces rather than trying to control. The result is exciting.

9. Affluenza by Oliver James. Although slightly pop-lit in its approach. This book covers one of the most important phenomena of our times – that of runaway consumption and include frightening statistics and simple solutions.

10. Let my People go Surfing. Again, not a simplicity book as such, but I love Patagonia’s approach and this wonderful recount of creating a business for the sheer love of it, rather than to make money. Other companies inspired by this approach include Howies, Sawdays and Innocent Drinks.

Watch this space for my own addition.

Although it may be a few years in the coming… so don’t go watching too hard.

Happy Reading.

Inside Simplicity

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“Our lives are frittered away by detail; simplify, simplify.” — Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)

First published in 1854, Henry David Thoreau’s work Walden is considered an American classic. It is an autobiographical diary, of sorts, that details Thoreau’s time living in a cabin in the woods near Walden Pond, in Massachusetts.

Thoreau lives in the cabin for two years, in an attempt to gain perspective on ‘society’, and focusing instead on simple living.

The book is not without its critics. However its place in American, even global, culture remains undisputed.

What is it about the book that captures a reoccurring zeitgeist, making it as relevant today as it was in the C19th?

Stripped bare of the mania of extravagance, possessions, complexity, luxury, distraction, noise etc – there is a beauty. A raw, unadulterated self that brings about great joy in the individual.

Without the noise, we find ourselves.

Certainly, there can often be pain in the shedding of these layers en route to our inner selves. However, once we gnaw through and seek the truth, we find our authentic selves shine more brightly without these cloaks.

That’s the key to simplicity. Shedding the superfluous. Understanding what contributes positively to the nature of your being and ignoring the distractions. The key is finding the pieces that matter most to you and removing those that take away. It’s not necessarily about having, or not having possessions, but about finding oneself.

It is not easy. We need to distinguish between those elements that leave us with a net positive, and those that result in instant pleasure but a net negative.

Simplicity is different for each of us. Whereas some people find simplicity on a roll-mat in a forest, I find it difficult to sleep without comfort. For me, a cabin or a tent with a mattress is a necessity. Understanding one’s own basic necessities and what makes us happy requires honest self-examination.

Simplicity is about peeling away the layers of confusion and seeking the sustenance beneath.

That is why Walden is timeless. It is because simplicity is so easy and so rewarding that it is extremely accessible. Yet the decision to simplify, or the societal barriers that stand in our way actually make it difficult to live a simple life. Thoreau gives voice to that part of the self that desires, even requires the basics.

“Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.” — Antoine de Saint Exupéry.

“So let us reflect on what is truly of value in life, what gives meaning to our lives and set our priorities on the basis of that”. – Dalai Lama

“What does a simplified life look like? There’s no one answer. While some might go to the extremes of living in a cabin in Alaska or on a tropical island, others find simplicity in a city while working a job with the hectic pace of a stockbroker. The key is to find what matters most to you, and to eliminate as much of the rest as possible.” – Leo Babatua

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Simplicity is complex

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Both very simple and very complex

My experiments with simplicity have resulted a few different permutations, culminating in one of the best years of my life (to date). Yet simplicity is an ongoing journey that brings sacrifice as well as reward and pain as well as pleasure.

Since July I have been living one version of the simple life here in Kenya – lounging cat-like in the rays of diminished responsibilities and time. Despite the absence on this platform, Simpletom has wiggled on, in the form of two first-drafted chapters of a book.

Simple living can, as you might imagine, be the easiest thing in the world, leading you effortlessly though the days. At other times, pursing simplicity can provoke a host of paradoxes, as you scrabble to maintain a simplicity that tangles the more you pick at the knots of complexity.

Simplicity isn’t always simple. There is an ever-changing balance that must be gently observed, or the pleasures of simplicity can remain beyond reach, the irony of which serves to goad.  It would be comic if it wasn’t so frustrating when you find yourself unable to live simply. It should be simple, right? I mean it’s there in the bloody phrase. Simple. Cue some of Murphy’s best legalese.

Yet it’s not always easy. If it were, we presume, it would be ubiquitous, given how rewarding it is.

One of the most interesting and important lessons that I’ve learned this year is to give light touch to the moments when life can appear complex, despite your intentions to the contrary. How to explain this eloquently?

I’ll try: When trying to live a simple life, things can often conspire against your intentions. It is only when you let go of the desire for continual simplicity that the complexity that has formed reduces somewhat and you find yourself where you wanted to be. The more you try to shift the balance, the harder the obstacle. Yet when you want something, it’s almost impossible to let go of that desire, even if the letting go is the solution to getting where you want to be. To use an analogy, it’s like trying to sleep when you can’t – the harder you try, the harder it gets.

Life doesn’t have to be complicated. Think of our citizens of Ladakh and Kenya. Our education systems train us to try hard and become experts, yet with sleep or simplicity, this can often take us further from our goal.

Relax. Take your time. Be gentle with yourself. Accept things as they are. Accept that there will be periods of life which work against you, no matter how hard you try to wriggle free. Enjoy this moment, even if it includes pain, suffering or sadness. Take on the moments that don’t seem to work. Enjoy times that teach you, even if the hurt. As my great friend, musician Jim Kroft says, “Suck it up”!

Go easy

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One of the best ways to determine the positive impact of a philosophy or lifestyle is to take a peek at the lives of those who follow it most closely and examine the result. However, perhaps even more important is the ability for the average person to adopt and maintain the philosophy.

Is a philosophy or a mode of living a good one if, despite the fact that in extreme examples it results in excellence, it is supremely difficult to follow and causes great pain and distress en route? Certainly, only the foolish or the inexperienced believe that significant change is easy. Yet, it seems that some ideas are just so hard to maintain, or have such powerful reactions elsewhere, that no matter how ideal the end goal, the journey is perhaps not worth investing in, despite the light at the end of the tunnel.

Celibacy, for example, has not been without its demons – despite the good intention behind it. Just go ask the Catholic Church.

It is oft believed that it is only by aspiring to the levels of discipline that a few extreme individuals (therefore perhaps extremists?) can achieve, you can truly adopt a way of life. Wouldn’t it be better if philosophies were gentler and understood the limitations of the average person, rather than the extremes? Yet our sporting, academic and professional lives all focus on those at the pinnacle, rather than the achievable.

I remember doing a workshop with the great Robert Holden, a kind friend who has just generously taken some time out to read a proposal for my book (yes, I may be boring you with more Simpletom musings in hard-form). The group were talking about our ambitions and things that we wanted to change about ourselves. When we put our lists together and examined them more closely – many of us discovered that these goals were often unachievable because some of them contradicted one another. You can’t be the head of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, whilst also living simply. It’s just not going to happen. Many of us would never be happy because we were always disappointing ourselves as a result of our contradicting ambitions.

Simplicity should be simple – yet many of those that pursue it turn it into another difficult challenge. As I have said, perhaps too often, we need convenient actions rather than inconvenient truths. By lowering our expectation, as I mentioned in my last post, we can go some way to achieving this.

In addition, a piece of advice I find myself offering and repeating all to often, to others and within is ‘Go easy on yourself’. If we treat ourselves a little more gently, we find that the stresses of life can reduce and that the days become a little more enjoyable. Find contentment in what you’ve managed to achieve, rather than that you haven’t. No matter how hard you work, or how little sleep you get, what you haven’t managed will always be infinitely greater.

Simple vs ‘smart’, why advertising is the new heroin

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This morning, feeling slightly fluey and wanting to take it easy on myself, I picked up a copy of GQ Magazine, a magazine that promises to help me ‘look sharp and live smart’ that is read by ~1m every month globally. A closer reading of that catchphrase might indicate that vanity is something to be desired. Let us have a quick look inside this magazine and just pretend, for a minute, that I’m highly impressionable and vain, obsessed by looking sharp and smart – a marketer’s dream consumer who buys everything he sees.

By the time I’ve got to a piece of ‘smart’ in the intellectual sense within the magazine, the letter from the editor – which is the first page that isn’t an index or an advert (or the first one that has any meaningful writing), I’m on page 60. This is a rare oasis, the next piece of content that is unrelated to consumption of goods or services is on page 151 of the 320 page magazine. A total of 185 pages within are dedicated exclusively to adverts. The remainder include index pages, pictures, contents of features that persuade you to buy things in the adverts, or see films, or go to restaurants. In total, there’s very little ‘smart’ within the magazine measured purely by the number of pages dedicated, without going so far as to analyse the content. Plus there is an awful lot of stupidity. For example, purchasing a $27,000 Rolex (note that I need not tell you what this is – the brand is so effective you already know), when you can buy a watch for $5 that performs many more functions and doesn’t turn you into a walking security risk would seem somewhat foolish.

Let’s say I bought one of each of the items advertised on pages 1 to 59 at the cheapest price a quick search of the internet can provide. My total shopping bill comes to $78,253.66 and I’ve bought a total of 40 items, including 7 jumpers, 3 watches, 5 jackets, 7 bottles of cologne and a host of other accessories that should rightly make me ‘smart and sharp’. I’ve also noted that 5 brands are now claiming that their products have the environment in mind. Whether that’s the truth or to induce me to believe the brand is worth buying, I’m none too sure, but boy do I feel better about the $78k hole in my bank account. The poorest country in the world, Zimbabwe, has a per capita GDP of ~$200, meaning that my little shopping spree would cover a mere 391 years of an average citizen’s life there. 80% of the world’s population lives on less than $10 per day. In their case, we’re covering 21 years of life. 21 years of life versus 40 items that, as far as I can tell aside from car insurance and a laptop, provide very little net additional utility to an individual’s life. Especially considering that aside from the car insurance, two bottles of liquor and a laptop, I’m fairly confident that I could purchase an item of replicable quality without a label for less than a tenth of the price. If I went second hand, we’re looking more like a twentieth or more of the price.

Continue reading →

Simplification and your perfect day

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A perfect day, with friends, deep on Hampstead Heath…

Here’s a little exercise or for you, dear reader. Not, I should add, the type of exercise that convinces self-help junkies they are minutes away from enlightenment. Nor one that has the slovenly amongst us feeling droopy-lidded. Instead, an exercise that should be fun…

Try to imagine your perfect day.

Now, before you imagine winning a gold medal at the Olympics in the morning, being massaged by Natalie Portman whilst she lectures you on micro-donations in the afternoon (perhaps that last part is unique to me), and having a fondue and poker session with Yoda, Cleopatra, JFK, Jesus, Jane Austen and Kurt Cobain in the evening, let’s set a couple of rules.

Rules and exercises – I’m sorry – this is rather uncharacteristic. After you’ve spent a number of good hours fantasising about a day that requires time-travel, re-incarnation (whether you include Jesus here is up to you), 84 hours and more energy than a puppy can muster in a room full of squeaky toys, let’s reign it in slightly shall we. No? OK, take your time. After all, my unrealistic day carried my mind happily through an extremely uncomfortable 8-hour journey from Johannesburg to Swaziland in a minibus not much larger than a camper van containing 20 humans, 10 chickens, 1 goat, more luggage than Hannibal took on his trans-alpine jaunt, and an extremely large dollop of tolerance. Continue reading →

The Most Valuable ‘Self-Help’ Course Ever (Yet It’s Free) – Vipassana

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meditation

Earlier this year I did a 10-day Vipassana silent meditation retreat and wrote a blog post on Bright Green Talent, which I wanted to share again, because even 6 months on, it continues to have a powerful effect on the way I think:

Vipassana one of those things that I was a little coy about beforehand – after all, people have all sorts of predisposed ideas about meditation, retreats and talk of spirituality. Strange that – why are people wary of engaging in activities of self-exploration? What is it that relegates even the most balanced of people into the ‘wafty’ box when they embark on such wholesome, secular ventures as yoga or meditation?

Vipassana has a fascinating setup – it is a charity that ONLY takes donations from people who’ve completed a 10-day course. This ‘try before you donate’ indicates the benefit the course brings to those who attend. It would be like going to a restaurant and voluntarily paying for what you thought the meal was worth, or a shoe company asking people to pay for their shoes after you’ve worn them for a month.

Armed with this information, as well as positive reports from books and friends, I ventured off to Hereford for this course. With wake-up gongs at 4am, 11 hours of silent meditation a day, and little personal experience, I will admit to a great deal of trepidation.

What can I say? It was one of the most difficult things I have ever done… and one of the most rewarding. When faced with nothing but your own mind for stimulation for 10 days, you are forced to accelerate through the peaks and troughs of emotion at a fearsome rate. The 10 days seem like a small lifetime: Next to me, a 20 veteran of the Greek army shed tears and a number of people quit. Perhaps stubbornness saw me to the finishing line. Some participants had attended up to 8 times previously and each, when we were finally allowed to talk on the final day, informed me that it never gets any easier.

I won’t say much more about the feelings, thoughts or sensations experienced. I’ll leave that for you to pluck up the courage and go and try it yourself. What I will say is that I will be going back in the future. It’s a lot of holiday used up in one go, yet 100,000 people a year benefit in indescribable ways and bring a newfound knowledge and peace back to their everyday lives.  And if I were a little more dictatorial and in the position to do so, I would force everyone on one… after all, the world (and the environment) would benefit no end from people getting to know themselves a little better.

Voluntary Simplicity

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Thoreau_simplicity

Probably the most famous advocate of simplicity is Duane Elgin, the author of the timeless ‘Voluntary Simplicity’ – it’s a wonderful book, full of authenticity and integrity. Here are some of the highlights and my thoughts:

•    Voluntary simplicity is described as the avoidance of exterior clutter, of many possessions irrelevant to the chief purpose of life.
•    He quotes Arnold Toynbee, who concluded that society’s growth was found in the Law of Progressive Simplification. Namely the ability of society to transfer increasing amounts of energy and attention from the material side of life to the non-material side, thereby advancing its culture, capacity for compassion, sense of community and democracy.
•    To live more simply is to encounter life more directly. It is life in its vastness, subtlety and preciousness that is the context within which simpler living acquires its most compelling meaning and significance.
•    We live almost completely immersed in a socially constructed reality that so fully absorbs our energy and attention that virtually none remains to experience the wonder of our existence.
•    Clarification between our ‘needs’ and our ‘wants’ are marked.
•    Simplicity is essential if we are to avoid the evolutionary detours of either ecological collapse of bureaucratic stagnation.

The book is full of stories, such as my own, of people who have found reward in gentle and conscious simplification. The message – try it for your self, escape the mad rush for a while and come to the gentle realization much of what we do, we worry about and we get stressed over is simply superfluous.

Tw-Interview with @ecosphericblog

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Interviews by twitter make for nice succinct questions and answers. Here’s one with Ecospheric, who kindly agreed to chat about simplicity. Find her on her blog, or on twitter

Q1 Who are you and what are you up to?
I am Beth Buczynski, a recent Colorado transplant. I love writing about the environment and hate answering my phone.

Q2 What keeps u awake at night?
Honestly, money keeps me up at night. Freelance writing is a starving woman’s gig!

Q3 What role do you think simplicity plays in the green/sustainability movement
Simplicity is a very important concept for ppl to grasp about sustainability- it’s not going w/o, it’s realizing u don’t need.

Q4 Do you make a deliberate attempt to keep your life simple?
Yes. It’s not always successful though. See answer to question 2. Though it’s cliche, reminding myself to see the amazing beauty in the little things that happen w/o me trying every day. like rain. or seeds sprouting.

Q5 if you could make something much simpler, what would it be?
I would make habitation simpler. It should be easier for people to create houses/homes for themselves. I should be able to dig up my entire yard or have chickens or catch my rain water w/o interference from the law or cranky neighbors.